


Draw/Breath

by Trekkele



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Avengers Tower, Avengers Tower Coffee Klatch, Domestic Avengers, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Not Phase Two compliant, Slice of Life, also Natasha being an adorable murder ballerina and superspy, marvel like its 2012, red room mention, she likes information ok.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-27
Updated: 2020-04-27
Packaged: 2021-03-02 04:54:02
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,471
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23829424
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Trekkele/pseuds/Trekkele
Summary: Natasha like knowing what makes people tick. She likes knowing things, about her teammates and her coworkers and herself. Oddly enough, sometimes other people like knowing her too.AKA: Natasha wants to know why Steve isn’t drawing anymore, and takes the long way round to get her answer. Because why not.
Relationships: Steve Rogers & Natasha Romanov
Comments: 11
Kudos: 52





	Draw/Breath

**Author's Note:**

> Much like Charlie Puth’s ex, I am posting this mostly because I just want attention. Also because I spent so long editing I no longer remember why I started writing this.  
> Look it’s almost 5k of me rambling about Natasha rambling about Steve. You have been warned.
> 
> An enormous thanks to heartsinger and AnxiouslyGoing for beta-ing and cheer-reading this thing.

There’s quite a lot of work behind convincing people you know everything.

Natasha should know, after spending several lifetimes just laying the groundwork, and another building up that reputation. And while it’s never been easy, she can say that the spread of instant communication _has_ made it slightly harder.

Before, the dance between bluff and fact was momentary, balancing on an edge with frozen breath. Now it was harder to keep the earnest, wide eyed misdirections from being conquered by google or a misspelled text message. 

For instance, the relevance of office gossip. Did you know that announcing someone's engagement just fifteen minutes after they’ve arrived on campus makes it _old_ news? 

Which is why, the morning after Mina’s boyfriend down in IT finally got his act together, Natasha had arrived fifteen minutes early, placing a box of cupcakes on her desk while some curious cubicle agents looked on, and then made sure to stroll by again _exactly_ as Mina opened the plain white card to find a smiley face and spider sticker inside.

Mina had just laughed, pulling Natasha into a hug as she showed her sparkly capitalist love rock to the other, now less-confused, cubicle agents.

Natasha had a reputation, and she knew how to keep it. And if her methods leaned more towards sugar and coloured icing than most of her former colleagues would have suspected, she considered that a bonus. 

Incidentally, while most male agents were rightfully terrified of Natasha, (and she liked them that way), the women of SHIELD thought she was the greatest thing since Director Carter. Natasha found this very gratifying.

The point being, Natasha has learned to read people and faces and situations the way most people would read an after mission report. She can pull the wispy hints into a story hours before the movie even starts and has turned it into an art form.

One that has the other agents eye her like she's the new oracle, risen from Delphi just to tell them who’s been sleeping with whom. So not that different from the Red Room, but with less, you know, torture and murder and indoctrination via strategically applied electric shocks. 

It did take her a few weeks, between Tony Stark’s (justified, but very public) breakdown and Thor’s daytime family drama (or maybe it was a L’oreal commercial - he _definitely_ had the hair for it) to realize that everyone else was practically giddy over the frozen American beefcake Fury was keeping in the basement. 

Well, she had known they were _excited,_ (who wouldn’t be? She had read _Le Morte d’Arthur_ too) but the awe, the hushed, almost reverent tones, was something she hadn’t anticipated. Maybe it was the Soviet cynicism baked into her bones, but mostly it was because unlike almost all the American agents (and quite a few others), she had no cultural knowledge fed to her from toddlerhood regarding one Captain Rogers, Steven G., call sign Captain America, US Army Special Forces (or WWII equivalent). These were people who saw and categorized the impossible daily. If they were acting like so many giddy schoolgirls, she wanted to know why. 

So she started pulling those files.

Oddly enough, despite the truly bizarre shit the Howlies had run into, it’s reading about his brief art school career that surprised her. It’s barely a paragraph, almost laughably brief when compared to the rest of it all - the information about Project Rebirth (mostly classified) and about the missions he ran with the Howling Commandos (mostly declassified). The files on the Howlies were extensive, and she could trace how Rogers and his team were the basis for almost every STRIKE team she’s worked with.

While the files and military reports called the Howling Commandos a team, all the biographies and interviews painted them as a family, and she couldn't help but see it in the way he looked at the Avengers. Steve knew exactly what they could become, and she thought a part of him was still scared and frozen because he already lost it once.

Natasha could remember stolen giggles in hidden bunkers and little girls following ruthless orders, and thought that maybe she understands that fear.

His history was impressive, she admitted, even if most of his tactics weren't really her style. He wielded his men with precision and grace, even though they were mostly a blunt instrument with a penchant for more C-4 then could be considered strictly necessary. 

His life before Project Rebirth was almost always a single chapter, a compression of 18-20 years that she found incredibly unsatisfying. Sometimes the authors dug deeper, and divided it in two - Steve’s life before his mother's death and then after. She skimmed the photos of his roommate and future Sargeant, ignoring the familiar itch of stolen memories in favor of studying Steve’s face. He had the same jaw, sharp cheekbones and steady eyes. She thought that maybe history exaggerated the transformation of Steve Rogers into Captain America a little too much - he was clearly always there. But the information they do have is slim at best, circumstantial and anecdotal. The authors always seemed to want to rush by it, skipping to the happy, the _‘isn’t life grand now that you don’t need to claw your way through breathing, through surviving every day?’_ As if war would have been any less deadly, less devastating to a man like Rogers, than his laundry list of illnesses.

She read between the lines a lot - a necessity when it came to piecing through the almost clinical sanitization of an American hero.

Starting with the father who died when he was almost six - and not during the Great War, like so many books mistakenly claimed - or the uncle that may have had ties to organized crime who disappeared when he was ten - and most biographies didn't even have him in the family tree. There’s a bitter taste of manufactured tragedy behind most of them, and she wondered how much of that was the cynic in her and how much of it really was some sort of romanticization of one man's life.

(Why it was necessary, she couldn’t understand, when so much of Steve’s life already read as a tragedy on its own. The once and future captain, bleeding in Americana and dripping sacrifice. It’s when she’s on her fourth biography, files open for reference and scattered over her coffee table, one with the particularly insipid phrases ‘brave orphan boys’ and ‘personification of the American dream’ that she realized even tragedy could be sanitized, stripped, if you tried hard enough and cut enough of the truth away. Who wanted to hear about America’s golden boy watching his immigrant father die from injuries in a war long gone? Better to pretend he died on a battlefield, as though that was a nobler death. Why talk about the sacrifices of a single mother in the Great Depression, weekends spent at marches and protests, hands raw and eyes angry? They could just read about the loving sacrifices of a woman who had worked herself to the bone for her son.)

But she could read all this, see it in Steve without ever picking up a book. Natasha could see it in the set of his shoulders, in the curve of his half-hearted smiles, even before she knew what she was looking for. But she knew artists, knew people with chalk dust under their nails and ink on their skin and the way they sometimes stopped breathing because _the light, yes perfect, can we just -_

And now that she knew what she was looking for, Rogers did do all that. He got stuck watching something and tracing lines with fingers that twitched, never on a mission, no, but in the in between moments where no one would notice.

But actually drawing, putting that pen to paper and letting the breath _out_ , was where he seemed to be stuck.

She could always dig up why, what exactly could drive a person like Steve away from breathing, when he’d already spent his whole life fighting for just one more breath. And maybe the idea scared her, just a little, that there might be something out there that _could_ , but it felt too easy, too cold to do it that way. Instead she’d wiggle her way in, like she always did - into SHIELD, into Sunday brunches with Pepper and Maria, into saving the world. Much more her style.

She might run around with a man in a tin can and a giant green monster some days, but Natasha Romanoff still enjoyed subtlety in some things. So she put her tourist face on and wandered lower Manhattan with maps in her back pocket and eyes wide, till she passed a shoe shop and then an art shop, both the little independent kind that she and Steve were both fond of. 

Supplies in paper bags, she settled into the subway car, into the rocking and the stale air and the oddly musical screeching of metal against the rails. Stage One, Complete.

Sometimes it worried her that where other people kept lists, she had missions, stages and battleplans in the privacy of her mind. But the truth was she liked it, the clarity and the goals, and it was fun. A reminder that simple tasks wouldn't end in death, even if she forgot to pick up milk.

It’s easy enough to find Steve, even without Jarvis’s helpful omniscience, perched on the couch and eyeing a documentary about early 20th century sci-fi.

Something he would have witnessed the rise of, Natasha realized, picturing him as a knobby kneed kid, racing down to the pop shop for the serials with the same determined look on his face. 

No wonder he looked annoyed every time the hosts subtly mocked the campy plots and exaggerated staging. It would be like criticizing Dog Cops in front of Clint - it might be trash, and he knew it might be trash, but it was _his_ trash. (And unlike Dog Cops, most of these had been revolutionary at the time.)

Besides, by Natasha’s count, _The Princess of Mars_ had more shirtless men (and less child-murder) than _Star Wars,_ so really, which movie was better sci-fi?

She vaulted over the couch, landing perfectly and mentally giving herself a standing ovation. The bag hadn't even crinkled. “Enjoying yourself?” She snapped her gum, settling in with her toes pointed at his thighs and arm over the back of the insanely comfortable couch. Rich friends were really nice.

Steve huffed, cheeks puffing out and waving his arm at the talking head. “This stuff, all the stories, they were… pretty much revolutionary to me as a kid. Kinda feels like this fella’s knocking my childhood for a gag, ya’know?”

He grinned at her, and it was his show grin, all wide and cotton candy and sweet ‘aw shucks’. The one he wore on days when it was all too much and he couldn’t quite care about anything. 

It shouldn’t have surprised her to find he had one, given how much she’d read and discarded as glorified press releases, but she recognized the look on his face. From the first time she’d seen it, facing down the press and the hounds, a mask that didn't really reach his eyes. 

She had one of those too.

“Good thing I've got something more entertaining than talking heads.” She wiggled her toes, wearing the white, unpatterned Toms she'd picked up.

“Should I be worried,” he smirked at her, “knowing what you usually call fun?” Natasha just poked him with her foot, waving her ankle in front of his face and watching him go adorably cross-eyed. 

“Very nice, Natasha, shoes. I knew you'd learn to wear them eventually. Can't say they're the most practical colour though.”

“Shut up, Rogers, I know you have white high tops, you fake hipster. Besides, these won't be staying white for long.”

“Exactly, that's why they aren't - “ she cut him off by grabbing the markers from the bag and shoving them into his face, assorted tips and 35 colours. 

Steve was a lot of things: Captain America, Avengers Team Mom, Mostly College Age, and terrifyingly competent in a way she suspected had nothing to do with the serum. He was also an artist. One who wasn't drawing. 

And he was someone who could turn the act of giving into taking, simply by believing he has gained something by it. It's honest and simple in a way that is so very _Steve,_ and if she had to exploit it to help him, then by God she would. 

Of course he was already holding the markers in his hands, mostly because she'd let go and the other option was to let them fall. 

It was almost reverent, the way he ran his hands over the packaging, tongue poking through his lips as he tried to concentrate on her, eyes flicking back to the markers. He'd probably never seen supplies like this. Everything that had been saved, all the pieces hanging in galleries were in charcoal and pencil and the occasional watercolor. Faded, still, his commercial work rare and often unidentified. 

“What are -”

Natasha wiggled her toes again, opening the picture folder on her phone and shoving it under Steve's nose. “I got white ones because I kept seeing custom ones like these and then I remembered I can't draw for shit - “ Steve didn't point out the obvious, that Natasha would never forget one of her many, _many_ skills, but raised an expressive eyebrow and started scrolling through the folder instead, “and then I figured hey, why not?”

He looked like he wanted to. He looked about five seconds from saying yes. She didn't know what prompted her to speak again. 

(And here she thought she'd fallen out of the habit of lying to herself. Steve made taking look like giving and she wanted, just a little bit, to understand how. To give something and watch him take it, and then give it back.)

“I like having things people - friends - made for me. They feel...real.” she wrapped her arms around her knees and met his eyes. Steve said nothing, just handed her back the phone and slid off the couch, waving the documentary off and thanking Jarvis.

“It'll be easier if I use the table, you can stay up there.”

Natasha promptly joined him, sitting across from him at the low glass table that was usually covered in any number of reports and cups and empty plates. Steve must have cleared it before he sat down, since he was the polite one around here. 

He just grinned at her contrary reaction, spreading the markers out softly and rolling them under his palms. She wondered if he would be this gentle if he knew she wasn't taking them back. Probably. He was careful with most things. 

She watched him line them up by colour, then turn the shoes she’d placed on the table slowly, grabbing a piece of scrap paper from under Pepper’s cover on Time Magazine and Tony’s on Vogue. 

“Want something in particular?”

“Go wild, Cap.” He winked at her, smirking with the left side of his mouth quirked up and looking like a kid caught in class. She did the mature thing and stuck out her tongue in response. 

“So what do you usually do while drawing? Sit in silence, contemplate life?” Steve flicked his eyelashes up at her, grinning, a real one this time. 

“Never had too much patience for philosophy, no. We - I usually listened to the radio, whatever was playing and wasn’t annoying.”

“I have a couple of podcasts, then.” He raised another eyebrow at her, tongue poking out between his lips and already half lost to whatever he’s doing to that scrap sheet. “Podcasts are like radio shows, but instead of being aired at set times only they’re uploaded to streaming apps and websites so that you can follow and listen whenever you want.”

Steve actually looked up at that, capping the blue marker as he set it down. 

“So you can go back and listen to old episodes, or start whenever you want? That’s pretty useful.” He bent back over his page, now glancing up at the shoes with every new line. 

“I’ve found a pretty good one on history - they go through decades in two to five year chunks, depending on how confusing shit is.”

Steve looked up, eyebrows set in mild confusion and tongue still poking out. “Didn’t you live through most of that?” Did he even know how right he was? Maybe. She never asked how much he’d figured out and he’d never be gauche enough to say. But she was sure he pieced together some - people like them learned to find each other, after all. 

“Mostly, but I was raised on propaganda and weapons. These guys are as unbiased as they can be and I think we both appreciate that.” He huffed in agreement, remembering all the history books he’d tossed aside in annoyance. 

They fell into an easy rhythm of Natasha watching his face as he drew, noticing when he got confused by a phrase or an expression, and pausing the podcast to give a quick definition. He laughed at some of the things he recognized and some of the things he didn’t, since she was replaying the episodes about the late forties and most of this was stuff he could have lived through. 

The markers in his hands acted as a sort of buffer between his own grief and the history he should have experienced. Sometimes it was so heavy she could almost taste it, old paper and gunpowder, regret clinging to everything he did.

She had found that the detached, almost clinically excited way the hosts would talk about things helped keep her own piecemeal memories at bay, and the same seemed to hold true for Steve. 

Jarvis kept offering to keep track of the things Steve wanted to look up later - no doubt compiling a full catalogue of articles for his reading pleasure. If Natasha hadn’t known better, she’d have thought Tony programmed the AI to have his own childhood hero-worship crush on the Captain.

But since she did know better, she looked forward to watching Tony have kittens over his baby entering puberty. She thought it was cute, the mutual respect and admiration they had going on. But Tony overreacting was always comedy gold. 

When they were almost halfway through the fifties, Pepper wandered in, kicking off her heels and waving as she headed straight for the pitcher of iced tea Bruce kept in the fridge. Banner kept doing that - making double of everything and leaving it around. He must have picked up the habit from Steve, who bullied them into a proper eating schedule through a combination of wide eyed sincerity, sarcastic mother henning, and a surprising amount of skill in the kitchen. 

Given that his love of the kitchen led to some quality stress baking, no one found it in them to complain. Not even Tony, who complained like it was part of his personality. 

Pepper set down three glasses with a sigh, sinking down to sit on Natasha's right. She filled them, giving a silent toast to Natasha’s smirk, and downed the glass in a shot. 

“Long day conquering the gilded halls of commerce, Miss Potts?” Natasha raised an eyebrow at Pepper’s elegant little snort, grinning fully around her own glass. 

“Very. Somedays I almost miss being a glorified gofer.”

“Please. You were never a gofer.”

They paused, glasses resting between them, both remembering how assisting a self destructive Tony Stark worked in practice and not theory, and simultaneously reached for the pitcher. Next time she was emptying a bottle of vodka into it when no one was looking. 

Between the super soldiers, the ex-alcoholic, and her, no one would even notice. 

She idly speculated how many bottles of Tony Stark's premium hooch she could liberate without him noticing, watching Pepper watch Steve, mesmerized by the way his hands moved. Sharp lines, quick and easy, and then flowing strokes over carefully chosen colours. 

She could admit that watching him was distracting. 

He kept turning the markers in his hands, flipping them over his knuckles as he adjusted the angle of the shoe, and then flicking another pen cap off. He must have noticed Pepper coming in, she’d paused the podcast and they’d started talking, but he hadn’t even reacted. 

It was charming, how Steve was so unfailingly _polite_ when it came to everyday things, and Natasha had realized a while ago that he treated Pepper the way she’d expected him to treat her - like a lady, more than anything else. 

She wondered when he’d figured out she wouldn’t appreciate that particular kind of chivalry, but that Pepper would. Probably within moments of meeting them. 

Watching them, sitting across the little table and both slumped on the plush rug of the living room, she thought it had to do with how Pepper presented herself. 

Because Pepper had always walked into a room like she owned it, like the click of her heels on board room tile was a challenge to all comers. Natasha had seen her go head to head with dozens of CEOs, people who thought she was another pretty face and a pretty mouth, and watched her claw her way to the top, every inch and every successful quarter all the proof the world might need. They all claimed ‘old world attitudes’, saying they couldn’t help it if they were shocked, because women just weren’t like that in their days. 

So it was nice when Captain America, born in the '20’s and raised before women could vote, took everything about her at face value, and never doubted what she could do. 

It was a heady feeling, after having to claw an inch, carve a ledge out of that mountain to stand in - to be given room beside him no matter what, because if you said you could do it, he believed you. 

That, and Steve knew that a lady could, above all else, have your head on a platter and no blood on her gown. Pepper liked that about him. 

“Hi Pepper,” He still didn’t look up, flicking the cap off a deep blue marker and gently lining something she couldn’t see. “How’s running the world going?”

Pepper grinned, “Stark Industries is doing fine, thanks for asking.” 

Almost like he could hear the grin in her voice, he looked up, blushing, “How long have you been sitting there?”

“Long enough,” Pepper laughed, “to realize that art apparently trumps the super soldier hearing.” 

“I wonder if food trumps art?” Natasha sipped from her drink, smirking at Steve. 

Pepper nodded, serious. “Or maybe just certain foods. We should test this out, write stuff down.”

“It’s only science if you write it down.” They both sing-songed, grinning at each other. 

“Are you done?” Steve pouted at them, looking like an overgrown toddler - and somehow he’d gotten a streak of blue on his forehead. It didn’t help him look any older. 

“Are you?” Natasha countered as Pepper eyed the shoes. She could sort of see what he’d done, flashes of blue and gold, but there was a difference between seeing something as he spun it around, and being handed a finished product.

He flushed again, glancing down at the mess of uncapped markers and paper scraps that her formerly white shoes were laying on. It looked a little like Tony’s lab, if Tony worked in art supplies and not circuitry most of the time. 

“Yeah, I think so.”

It was amazing, what he’d done with black lines of varying weights and a few well placed colours.

The shoes were made of stained glass, wrapping around canvas in unpatterned shapes, telling a story with every set of panels. He’d set it so that the colours started fading out halfway up the shoe, so that only the figures were coloured in fully and the background glass was marked in thin black lines at the edge, and a heavy line where a new panel began. It would be like a walking storybook, if she ever walked in them. 

Natasha cleared her throat, a tiny cough and an inhale at what he’d just...handed her, even if she’d requested it. “Cinderella?” she teased, as if she couldn't see the care in every line, the regard in which he held her. It was impossible to miss, if you knew him. And she knew him, she’d made sure of it before they started. 

Pepper leaned forward, eyes wide. Natasha could already see her trying to figure out if Steve would mind scribbling on the white chucks Natasha knew were tumbled at the back of her walk-in, behind the power suits and cut off jeans. 

Steve just shrugged, “It fit, I think.”

“Girl changes identity with the switch of a dress?” Her grin was maybe sharper than he deserved, and the look he gave her was just as pointed. It was so nice, she thought, to have people who could keep up. 

“No.” he shook his head firmly. “A girl is put in an untenable situation by those who should have protected her, and refuses to lose her compassion or self respect despite that.”

And again the Captain put a lump in her throat that she can’t quite breath around.

Pepper lifted the other shoe, chattering about colours and lighting and how he’d done it on this tiny canvas framed as footwear, one hand on the small of Natasha's back and thumb rubbing soft circles on her spine. Pepper could always read her better than most, even when she’d been lying about everything. 

Steve started capping the pens, answering Pepper easily and stacking the scraps he plotted on.

She always wondered what could drive an artist to stop, to pause his breathing and carry on, but the thing was it wasn't just art - Steve saw people, down to their bones, and maybe it hurt too much to see the ones who were gone on a flattened page before him. After all, she held the proof of what he could see in her hands. 

She’d wanted to give by taking, the way he seemed to, pushing gifts at people as easy as he breathed, but she never planned on actually _giving_ so much. 

She found that maybe she didn’t mind. 

Maybe it was like dancing. Maybe it was that once you stopped, you needed someone else to pull you back in, to show you how the music flowed. 

Maybe she had given him that breath, that inhale, that would let him start again, but she could hear the music in the way her friends spoke to each other and thought, breathing is just your body dancing. 

Maybe they could all learn to breathe again. 

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks for reading! Leave your complaints with the manager and compliments with me


End file.
